See How Fast Your Site Is

I added one of my websites and Google came back with a score of 57 (out of 100). I have no idea if 57 is good. If I was in school that would be a flunking grade 🙁 … and that’s not good.

I think the value of the score comes into play after you implement Google’s PageService. So lets just remember that 57 for later.

Now click on the Measure Speedup button.

After a few seconds, or minutes, depending on how busy things are, you will get a page back that tells you what kind of improvement you can expect using PageSpeed Service. Google reported a 18% reduction in percent load time for my site after optimizing with PageSpeed Service.

Lets Step Back For A Minute

Google is quite the salesperson. They have told you what the situation is (“site speed is an important factor in search rankings”). The problem is that if you don’t have a fast site, your search engine rankings will not be as good as they could be. The implication is that you won’t get as many visitors/customers to your website. You need a faster web site.

Food for thought.

Now back to our regular posting …

Signup

I’m in – hook, line and sinker.

Give Google your gmail address and a web site url and Submit.

If all goes well, you should have an approval email within a few hours.

Get Started

Add New Domain. Enter a domain you want to optimize.

First thing you will need to do is Claim ownership. This involves downloading a html file and uploading to your website to verify you are indeed the owner. Confirm that the page exists by clicking on the link provided you upload. Then click on the red Verify button. Easy.

If you have any 301 redirects, you will need to remove those before moving on.

Setup Serving Domain

If all goes well, the next step is to setup serving domain.

This is probably the “techy” part of the whole thing. Google provides instructions on what to do if your site is registered at some of the biggest DNS providers like namecheap, godaddy, etc.

If you have your own server (dedicated), then you will need to login to your Webhost Manager (WHM) and make the appropriate changes.

Google said I needed to change the CNAME (record type) to point to pagespeed.googlehosted.com instead of my current domain.

Done

Your site is setup to be served by Google’s PageSpeed Service now. Congrats!

Google then gives you a link to do a speed test.

Its not really useful at this point, it simply shows you what your current site speed is and what it could be when optimized.

You might be thinking, well I am optimized, right?

It takes a few hours (at least it did for me), till the PageSpeed service kicks in. So wait a few hours and be prepared to be impressed (serious)!

You’ll know PageSpeed is working if you view the source code for your site and you see the word pagespeed somewhere …

This Is One Way

There are other ways to get improved website speed – go with a hosting provider that uses some serious horsepower.

I know for a fact that James at AltWeb is using the latest and greatest server setup that includes (2) front end servers, (1) database server and a load balancer.

Like I said, pagespeed is one way …

Google PageSpeed Service Video

Step by step video showing you how to setup PageSpeed service.

P.S. – Looks like PageSpeed is now serving content. Remember I showed a Score of 57. Now the score is 80 and the page load time is down to about 1.2s versus the previous ~2.2s.

Custom optimization is a robust and long term improvement approach.
I achieved great results using 100% FREE tools and services.
Most websites now load consistently under 2 seconds. Some under 1 second.

More importantly, the experience has influenced design of new sites, so they are fast from the start.